We’re losing control of the Internet
Two stories hit my desk today that serve as a stark reminder that the Internet as we know and love it is not guaranteed to continue on indefinitely. The first was the announcement that the Senate Commerce Committee split their vote on proposed compromise language on Net Neutrality (the idea that carriers should treat every packet on the internet the same). Plenty has been written on this subject so I won’t repeat the arguments here, but suffice it to say that the failure to guarantee neutrality on the net is a huge loss to anyone who cares about the future of the internet (and has a clue). The second was sent by my partner Greg Galanos via Brad and pointed to the Wired blog post on how to detect whether your net traffic is being sniffed by the government. It highlights an analysis done by the EFF that concludes that the allegations of AT&T secret surveillance rooms are likely valid, that the program covers domestic traffic, not just international traffic and that the system is capable of looking at content, not just addresses. You can read the full EFF report here (its been redacted by the government for security purposes). …
June 29, 2006· 2 min read
AppExchange is the new black
eBay jumped on the App Exchange bandwagon with an announcement from their development conference this weekend of a bunch of new APIs and development tools. This was a pretty broad announcement – Shoping.com, ProStores and even PayPal (who had traditionally been relatively closed) are participating in the effort – and expands their existing developer efforts significantly (see their developer site for more information). API’s are certainly nothing new – they are common ways for companies to allow access to their systems – but it seems to me that application exchanges are the new ‘it’ thing to do for platform companies (Salesforce.com, Google, eBay, etc.). This is a pretty new concept – companies in the past were extremely protective of their platforms and wanted to control almost every aspect of access to their systems (in this paradigm “open system” often meant ‘we’ll let you use our proprietary scripting engine to ‘develop’ to our platform). Companies have loosened this view in more years and moved to more open API’s (sometimes through a developer program; more recently completely open to anyone who wants to access them). The AppExchange idea is the next logical extension of this (the “Web 2.0 model for development”, if you will) and makes perfect sense: open your system, give support and help to those that want to develop extensions to it and give them a single home where users of your software can find these extensions. Its free development work, makes your platform that much more powerful and provides a nice sourcing ground for potential acquisitions. …
June 13, 2006· 2 min read
It’s just technology
I was on a panel presentation about blogging and RSS at the Boulder Software Club recently along with Walker Fenton from NewsGator and Howard Kaushansky from Umbria. Very fun time (hey – what VC doesn’t enjoy an opportunity to share their opinion); plus I got two beers out of Brad for managing to say “fuck” twice – both completely in context I might add. What struck me most during the presentation is how much more power the technology which is RSS has when you explain it in terms of what it does rather than what it is. RSS is pretty meaningless beyond a relative small group of techies and frankly no one really cares about the underlying technology – they all care about what they can do with it. Those of us who spend a lot of time talking about RSS/Blogging/Feeds/Aggregators/etc do a shitty job of separating out useless concepts to most audiences (“RSS” or “XML”) with useful ones (“this stuff helps you do xyz”). Speaking in jargon solicited blank stares; giving examples of what people were doing with RSS to further their business solicited engagement and follow up. As a community of technologists, we should be better at this.
March 6, 2006· 1 min read
Behind the Oracle Fusion Noise
Newmerix CTO Niel Robertson has an excellent (and amusing) post that tries to decipher all the spin coming out of Oracle about their Fusion platform (they are 1/2 way to completing it towards a release date in 2008, although with the PR energy they are putting behind their recent Fusion “update” event in San Francisco you’d think they actually had some real news to share . . .). Here’s a link to Niel’s post – I pity the fool. …
January 30, 2006· 1 min read
Unleashing Plaxo Hell
I did something this morning that falls into the category of ‘seemed like a good idea at the time’ but which upon reflection (or more accurately, upon understanding reality) falls into the category of “you dumb mother-fucker”. Put another way, I unleashed Plaxo on all my contacts this morning as I calmly sipped my first cup of coffee sitting comfortably in my pajamas at my kitchen island – oblivious to the hell I was setting free. I’ve been waiting years to do this, but something always held me back. I finally broke down and decided that I really did need to clean up my contact database (I keep a lot of contacts and its helpful to know what’s up to date and what’s not). So if you are in my contacts and I have your valid e-mail address, this morning you received a cheerful note from me asking you to update your information. THIS WAS NOT A GOOD IDEA. While I got some useful information back, there were some second order effects that I had not thought about. Here’s a few: 1)ont-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;”> I basically just spammed my entire contact list. I wasn’t really thinking about this as spam at the time, but that’s essentially what it was 2)ont-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;”> I got several hundred e-mails from Plaxo itself, clogging my inbox as people updated their information (fortunately Plaxo lists people in groups, so one notice would have 20 or 30 updates announcements in it – so I suppose it could have been even worse). 3)ont-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;”> I got a bunch of e-mails from people telling me they hate Plaxo (mostly because they don’t trust it) and then giving me their contact information in e-mail form (which I had to enter manually – pretty much what I was trying to avoid). 4)ont-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;”> Plaxo errantly sent some update requests to a few mailing lists that I’m on (and have permission to send to) – that was a bit embarrassing. 5)ont-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;”> I reached out and touched a lot of contacts at one time, which resulted in a lot of people reaching out and touching me – I now have about 30 ‘catch-up’ lunches/coffee/meetings scheduled over the next month as a result (don’t get me wrong – I’m happy to catch up with these people – just not all at once) 6)ont-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;”> I have a long list of contacts that couldn’t be reached. While this is what I was looking for when I set out on my Plaxo mission this morning, seeing them all listed out makes me wonder exactly what I though I was planning on doing with all this information in the first place (perhaps ignorance really is bliss) What I should have done was install the program and not sent out the update request (Plaxo has a reasonably nice way to manage your contacts as e-mails come in) – this would have gotten me about 98% of what I now realize I was looking for without any of the annoyance. …
January 26, 2006· 3 min read
The Song Tapper
I wrote a post last year about conveying information effectively in which I talked about how difficult it is for someone to guess a song that you are tapping out with a finger (but how easy is feels like it should be when you are the one doing the tapping). Its a true phenomenon, although I meant it as a metaphor for (or perhaps just an example of) how easy it is for people to overestimate their ability to clearly communicate their thoughts/ideas with others. …
January 5, 2006· 1 min read
A tree fell in the forest – IBM’s Patent Portfolio
In the category of “big news that no one seems to be talking about”, two days ago IBM announced that it was launching a new licensing program with the venture community to allow easier access to IBM’s broad patent portfolio for start-up companies. This is actually a big deal (it is to me at least, which is why I’m shocked at the lack of press on the announcement). IBM is vastly simplifying how companies can gain access to its patent portfolio. It’s catered to the venture community (the program is intended to be administered through the companies’ venture investors) and was in part put together by IBM’s venture capital advisory board. In a nutshell if you are a company that has less than $10m in revenue you can access the entire IBM patent portfolio for $25,000 for a 3 year term. Companies with above $10m in revenue sign a customized five year agreement (the information I saw suggested that the license fee would be 1%).I’m not a big fan of our country’s IP laws – patent law is kind of like the IRS code (its overly complicated for the sake of being complicated, doesn’t do a good job of driving desired behavior, but works just enough for most people to figure its not worth the incredible pain in the ass of trying to reform it). But for the moment, at least, we’re stuck with the current system and moves like this one from IBM vastly simplify the process of navigating the patent waters. Hopefully more companies with large patent portfolios will follow suit.
December 15, 2005· 2 min read
The downside of technology
Brad sent me an article a few days ago that described the very unplugged world of Warren Buffett (according to the article the most technologically advanced device he has in his office is a telephone, which he uses sparingly). It’s a pretty amazing read and reminded me of another article that was sent to me recently – this time by Dave Jilk – describing how technology is changing (negatively) the way people work (too distracted, shortening our attention span, ruining our vacations, etc.). …
November 16, 2005· 2 min read
What’s your million dollar idea?
Thanks to JB for pointing this out. Pretty interesting idea. I particularly like it from a data representation standpoint (see my post on that subject here). http://milliondollarhomepage.com/
September 26, 2005· 1 min read
Time and place
I’m annoyed at the sate of the user interface for computing these days. It’s too hard to sync or share data across applications (the ‘suite’ concept for office seems to be missing completely – little app buttons in various programs or not) and it’s both annoying and difficult to get my computer to present information to me in the way I want it. I think the root of the problem is that there is no concept of relationship in (or god forbid, between) applications. I’m constantly typing information and then retyping or cutting and pasting it somewhere else. I can’t easily clip something from one work area and put it into another. Other than folders (which are painfully annoying and take forever to sync), there’s little concept of work-group or workspace in computing today. Here’s a great example, which both shows what a bone head I am as well as how far away from ideal we are. I missed a call this week. It was a short update call with one of the companies I work with, but still I missed it and it annoyed the heck out of me (which for me means that I’m its going to be on my mind for the next week). Here’s what happened: When I travel, I put information in my calendar in the time zone of the place where I will be that day, rather than in my ‘home’ time zone. To me, this just made sense – no need to adjust for where I was when looking at my calendar. Since there’s no way in Outlook to easily change between time zones this seemed like the best plan (although I really like their feature that allows you to place a second set of times on the left side of the screen – very very helpful and even better, only six short clicks away! [sarcasm intended]). The problem, which is what messed me up today, is that when someone sends me an invite it shows up in my home time zone, so I need to remember to change the meeting in Outlook to the time zone where I’ll actually be. I forgot to do this today, looked at the meeting time, assumed that it was in the calendar in pacific time and missed the meeting.Apparently somewhere between Office v1 and Office v11, no one ever figured out that time shifting is important. There’s no ability in Outlook Calendar to set different time zones for different days (let alone w/in a single day). There’s literally dozens of time zone options to choose from, but you can only display one at a time (other than the kluge I describe above) – there’s just no concept of shifting time temporarily. I would have thought software was more well thought out than that by now . . .
May 19, 2005· 3 min read